Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language

2021/07/16 by Peter L. M. Jansen, Jansen, Peter, Jordan Boyd‐Graber +1
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Translation Studies and Practices

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.08146

openalex publication_date 2021/07/16 · openalex created_date 2022/10/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Tamarian, a fictional language introduced in the Star Trek episode Darmok, communicates meaning through utterances of metaphorical references, such as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" instead of "We should work together." This work assembles a Tamarian-English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels, and uses this to construct a parallel corpus of 456 English-Tamarian utterances. A machine translation system based on a large language model (T5) is trained using this parallel corpus, and is shown to produce an accuracy of 76% when translating from English to Tamarian on known utterances.

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